


To Stay Silent

by elsmaster



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Post Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-01
Updated: 2013-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-23 06:05:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/618912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elsmaster/pseuds/elsmaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"John glares. Sherlock smokes. A car alarm wails two streets away."</p>
<p>Sherlock is back and things have changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Stay Silent

Key, lock, door.  Seventeen steps up: half-running but slow enough not to sound rushed. Door to the sitting room: already open. John: coming straight from work, dressed accordingly, tired, frowning.

“You’re smoking. Indoors,” John says, disapproving.

Sherlock can’t be bothered to reply.

“It’s a bit disgusting,” John notes. He doesn’t sit down. Clenches and unclenches his fingers. Wants to say something but doesn’t know how.

“Hardly your problem,” Sherlock replies, puts out his cigarette and lights another.

“I still live here,” John says. Fingernails digging into his palms. Nervous. Upset. Good.

“Debatable.”

John glares. Sherlock smokes. A car alarm wails two streets away. John crosses his arms.

“Mary wants you to come to dinner. Saturday,” John says. _Mary wants_. Doesn’t John? Of course not. Sherlock and John’s girlfriends don’t mix well. John and Mary are still together because Sherlock was dead for three years. Unfortunate.

Sherlock raises a dubious eyebrow. It speaks volumes.

“I’d like you to come, too,” John adds, voice softer now. Why? Guilt? Yes. Why?

Sherlock died and John mourned for him. Sherlock came back and John punched him and refused to talk to him for weeks. It took months of careful persuasion and far too many less-than-eights to get John to move back to 221B. Except he never did properly move back. Because.

“You don’t,” Sherlock tells him. John does not argue. Both remain quiet long enough for Sherlock to finish his cigarette. He doesn’t light another one.

“Are we going to talk about this?” John asks. Sherlock rolls his eyes.

“This?”

John makes a face.

Sherlock says nothing.

“I’m expecting you to turn up on Saturday,” John tells him.

“Yes,” Sherlock replies.

“Is that a ‘yes, John, I’ll be there’ or ‘yes, John, you’ll expect me to turn up’?”

“Yes.”

John sighs and turns to leave. He closes the sitting room door behind him and pounds down the stairs. Sherlock closes his eyes and thinks of decomposing limbs.

 

Mary’s flat is average in a way that is bordering on repulsive. Not too small and not too big. Floral wallpapers from the mid-eighties, heavy curtains the previous tenant left behind. Mary has two cats. Her hair isn’t quite blond and not quite brown. She smiles at John when he speaks and is very obviously, irreversibly in love with him. She makes John look ordinary. There is a framed print of Starry Night on her wall and Sherlock tries not to sneer in disgust. He does not quite succeed. He makes a half-hearted attempt at complimenting her cooking and it turns out the roast is John’s doing. Of course.

Mary does not like Sherlock, which isn’t surprising. She tolerates him, which is. Her cats like Sherlock and keep rubbing their heads and backs against his legs. He drinks his wine to keep from killing himself or everyone else in the room. Except for John. Just the cats. Possibly Mary. Definitely the heinous print on the wall.

John does most of the talking and Mary does most of the laughing. Sherlock mostly pushes his food around on his plate and smiles politely when he’s expected to. John knows it’s not genuine but Mary doesn’t.

One of the cats sneaks out the door with Sherlock and he takes it to Baker Street. John yells at him over the phone a few hours later and Sherlock knows it’s not the kidnapping of the cat he’s mad about.

Sherlock returns the feline the next day. Mary is not at home and John isn’t there either, so he just picks the lock, leaves the cat and takes the godawful Da Vinci print off the wall. He takes it back to 221B and burns it. It makes him feel oddly accomplished.

He doesn’t hear a word from John for a week.

 

“I’m moving out.”

John stands at the door, coat on, looking like he can’t decide whether to be angry of anxious.

“Not that. Not that there’s a lot of my things here, anyway, anymore,” he adds. It hurts. Like stubbing your toe on the kitchen counter. Why does it hurt?

“Fine,” Sherlock says, not looking up from his microscope.

John fidgets.

“We, uh,” he says and Sherlock stares at a wall. “I asked her to marry me.”

Sherlock does turn to look. John does not look happy. Maybe he isn’t. Not at the moment.

“Did you,” Sherlock says. John nods. Sherlock turns back to his microscope. He doesn’t look through it.

John clears his throat.

“Do you,” he hesitates, “want to have coffee someday or––“

“No.”

“Right. Right. You’re busy. Of course.” He nods a few times. Sherlock can’t see this but he knows. “I’ll come over tomorrow and get my things. If you’re home we could––”

“No.”

John huffs, shakes his head and walks out.

Sherlock makes sure to stay as a far away from 221B as possible for the next few days. He solves a triple homicide for Lestrade and points him to the roundabout direction of a boring blackmailer.

When he finally returns to Baker Street, he’s been running on adrenalin for 46 hours and collapses on the sitting room sofa. When he wakes up, thirteen hours later, he reads the ten texts John has sent him.

_Thur 15:23_  
 _I’ll come back for the dvds later._  
 _Cleaned the kitchen. Wouldn’t kill_  
 _you to do it yourself sometimes._

_Thur 15:42_  
 _The offer still stands. The coffee, I mean._

_Thur 17:01_  
 _You’re ignoring me, aren’t you._

_Thur 21:14_  
 _Very mature._

_Fri 16:45_  
 _Greg said you were on a case._  
 _Try not to get shot._

_Fri 23:38_  
 _Catch the killer yet?_

_Sat 10:12_  
 _Let me know when you’ve solved it._

_Sat 10:18_  
 _Or that you’re not dead. Again._

_Sat 17:21_  
 _We need to talk about this one day, you know._

_Sat 17:26_  
 _Me moving out and you being a child about it, I mean._

**Sat 22:01**  
 **Not interested.**  
 **SH**

John does not reply. He turns up at Baker Street instead. Sherlock can hear him talking to Mrs. Hudson downstairs, thinks about escaping through the kitchen window and decides against it. He lays down on the sofa instead, posed in the most bored fashion imaginable.

“What are you doing here?” he asks when John steps into the flat. He knows – of course he knows – but doesn’t feel like being particularly nice.

John takes off his coat and hangs it by the door. Doesn’t throw it on his chair by the fireplace like he used to. Annoying.

“So you caught him?” he asks.

“Her. Obviously,” Sherlock replies, staring at the ceiling.

“Of course.”

John takes a dining chair and sits down. Interesting. He rests his elbows on his knees and leans forward.

“Look,” he says and then pauses.

“No,” Sherlock says.

“Look,” John tries again, more demanding. Jaw line tensing. Angry. Good.

“No,” Sherlock says again, this time accompanied with an exaggerated eye-roll.

John stands up and yells at Sherlock. Yells at him for being selfish, childish and, most of all, a liar. For making John mourn for something that wasn’t real, for taking away everything that had become his life.

Sherlock listens and says nothing. John calms down, eventually.

“Look,” John says again, squeezing the back of his chair so hard Sherlock expects it to crack. “Look. It’s not–– I didn’t–– What was I supposed to do, hm? Put everything on hold and wait for you to miraculously come back? That’s not–– That doesn’t _happen_. In real life. When people die, they’re. Dead. Forever.” He looks down and smiles. It’s a sad smile. “And those left behind, well. They move on.”

Sherlock remains silent. Counts the cracks on the ceiling for the sixth time in ten minutes. Not that he has to. John waits for him to say something and then walks out, slamming the door behind him.

“Oh,” Sherlock says when the door downstairs fall shut. “Oh.”

*

John stands out on Baker Street, unmoving, for three minutes and forty-six seconds. He counts the seconds. He has to. It makes sense, at the time. He doesn’t want to be standing out on Baker Street, not like this. Not _because_.

_Don’t. Be. Dead._

Got what he wished for, didn’t he. If only a little late.

He still doesn’t quite know what to do with a man who suddenly returns from the dead. Not after he’s worked so hard to make his life right again; learned to function without chasing after criminals through the city, without the constant thrum of adrenaline in his ears. John has done his best to do what he should have done after returning from the battlefield the first time: he has moved on. He is happy. He is normal.

It’s easier, sort of. It’s a decision, a commitment: no more running around, no more barely-dodged bullets. John lives a normal life now. Has normal nights in with Mary, goes out to the pub with his mates for a pint or four or five.

He hates all of it. Not Mary, or the nights in, or the pints; not any of it, really. Just. All of it. He hates knowing he has a choice now. _Would_ have a choice. He could choose to join Sherlock on his mad jogs through the alleys of London instead of staying in or going to the pub. It’s that possibility that makes him ache and stare at walls when no one is around to see.

When he saw Sherlock Holmes stand before him, alive and breathing, after _three bloody years_ , John’s first impulse had been to punch the man in the face. Right between the eyes. It wasn’t as satisfying as it should have been.

Sherlock, the utter bastard, had probably just assumed things would return to normal after his miraculous resurrection. That John would drop everything and join him on his insane adventures, following his coat tails and saving his life, again and again. Again. Sherlock, the utter bastard, was wrong. For once. Well. Not entirely wrong. Wrong the same way he had been about Harry. Wrong to assume.

During the three years following his best friend’s death, John Watson had built a life for himself. He had, against all odds and his own expectations, got better. He had learned to be fine. Properly, actually fine. Not the _fine_ he had repeated like a mantra for the first two months, but really, honestly, perfectly fine. Happy, even. Content. Mostly. Usually.

John stands out on Baker Street and, suddenly, isn’t fine at all. Well, not _suddenly_. He has been expecting something like this ever since he realised he couldn’t be around Sherlock, couldn’t stay at 221B for long periods of time, without being irrationally angry and thoroughly miserable. It feels like someone has died again. Like he has lost everything, for the third time in an awfully short period of time.

Because there is the choice. And it _is_ a choice. It can’t be a compromise; there are no compromises with Sherlock Holmes. And John knows what he’ll choose if he really thinks about it, which is exactly why he doesn’t want to. Not to think or to choose. Because he knows it’ll hurt and he knows it won’t make sense, not to anyone else.

If he chooses this life, this new life, the one he spent nearly three years building for himself – _his_ life – he’ll lose everything. If he chooses the other life, the life that should have ceased to exist all those years ago, he’ll lose everything.

John knows what he would choose, which is exactly why he doesn’t. It’s why he asked Mary to be his wife; it’s why he’s trying to hold onto _this_ , the normal, the ordinary. Because sometimes mundane is good and sometimes it’s not a bad thing when nothing happens. Sometimes it makes him act like an idiot and ask the world’s only consulting detective to do something as dull as sit down and have coffee with him.

He also knows he never had to think about being happy, back then. He just was. Happiest he had ever been. Content. Even with body parts in the fridge and sudden fires in the sitting room. And if he allows himself to really think about it, it probably was the happiest he ever _will_ be, and the thought both terrifies and thrills him.

The door behind him opens, and John stares intently at his shoes. A pair of bare feet appear next to them. He hears a lighter and smells the cigarette smoke.

“Trying to catch cancer _and_ hypothermia?” he says, mostly just to say something. Funny is good. Breaks the ice.

Sherlock doesn’t dignify the remark with an answer.

“She didn’t say ‘yes’,” he says, instead.

John huffs a laugh. He’s terrified of how sad it comes out.

“No. She didn’t,” he admits and looks up. Ahead, not to his side.

They both stay silent for twelve and a half seconds. The half a second is a rough estimate.

“She didn’t say no, either,” Sherlock supplies and John just shakes his head slightly. “You’re moving out to prove a point. It’s completely moronic,” Sherlock continues, the insult not really an insult at all, but a factual statement. John agrees, only not out loud.

“She thinks you’re a bad influence,” he tells Sherlock. He can almost hear the dismissive quirk of an eyebrow. “The art theft was a bit much,” he adds.

“It’s not art theft if no art is stolen. Unless she thinks it was an original, in which case I suggest you take back your proposal,” Sherlock notes. Breaks the ice.

They stand there for a moment longer, the silence now more companionable than awkward.

“Let me know when you’ll be moving back in,” Sherlock then says and John turns to look at him, a half-amused, half-annoyed smile on his face.

“Who said anything about moving back?”

Sherlock gives him the _surely you cannot be that stupid_ look he must have practised in front of a mirror a thousand times as a child.

John laughs and shakes his head. It’s not a choice, not really.

“Come on, let’s go back up. I’ll make tea and you can tell me more about the killer you caught,” he says, patting Sherlock on the shoulder. It feels odd and he doesn’t care.

“There was a blackmailer as well,” Sherlock tells him, clearly pleased with himself.

John grins, shakes his head.

“You are incredible, you know.”

Sherlock smirks, fondly. Which shouldn’t be possible but is. Figures.


End file.
